Workflow - Examples

Example 1- Several People must sign for a change and it is not necessary that one must sign prior to another.

In this example, suppose that there is a new item being set up in the item master file and several departments and individuals must enter data for their fields, but that there is no dependency on other groups. A notification might be sent to all departments- Planning, Finance, Purchasing, Quality, Engineering, Manufacturing, Customer Service and Sales. Each department or a representative of each would be assigned to receive notification after an item master add transaction is processed. Each would then go in and update their portion.

All users for this workflow would be set to level 0.

Example 2- Several People must sign for a change and after they are done someone else must perform a final step.

Let's take the prior example and say that after the Planning group completes their task, then the Quality Group must go in and perform a final review and approval. In this workflow, the initiation would begin with an add record workflow going to all departments at level 1 except Planning and Quality. Quality wants to review after all other departments have made their change and since the last group to make changes before Quality reviews is Planning, we would have all users at level 1 except Planning (level 2) and Quality (level 3 or higher up to 9). Also, since Quality is very busy and does not want to be interrupted for this type of change we might have set their Notify? flag to N. Then perhaps once at the beginning of each day they would enter the system and go to IDT300-01 through option 22 to see what new records have arrived for their signature.

Example 3- One person wants notification but does not need to sign off.

The Sales Manager, John, for Region 3 wants to welcome new customers to his territory. In this scenario, we need to create a workflow that notifies John for any Customer Master record where the Region is equal to 3. Since Database Monitor is only looking at changes on a going forward basis, the workflow would have the criterion set for the region field level 'EQ' for the value '3'. In this way, John will be notified whether it is a new customer for the company or if it is an existing customer that has moved or added a location to his region. John would be at level 0 with no signature required and immediate notification.

We hope that these simple examples give you some idea of why and how to set up and use Database Monitor to help your business run more efficiently.